1. Field of the Invention
The invention is in the field of scrub brushes, more particularly surgical scrub brushes designed for cleaning and disinfecting a medical practitioner's hands and fingers, including the gap underneath the practitioner's fingernails.
2. Relevant Technology
Scrub brushes are commonly used to clean a person's arms and hands. In a surgical or other medial setting, doctors and other medical practitioners are required to scrub for a prescribed period of time to ensure complete sterilization of the arms and hands to prevent contamination of patients by e.g., bacteria, viruses and fungi.
A water moistened scrub brush is typically held with one hand and moved in a back and forth motion relative to the arms, hands and fingers of the other hand being cleaned. Cleansing detergents are used to help remove dirt and debris that are difficult to remove with water and mechanical scrubbing along. Sterilizing detergents and other agents can be used to kill pathogens in addition to being physically removed from the finger tips.
Detergents and soaps tend to be very slippery and can complicate the scrubbing process. Extreme care must be taken to maintain proper alignment between the slippery brush bristles and slippery finger tips while maintaining a vigorous back and forth scrubbing motion. Moreover, the bristles used in surgical scrub brushes are typically soft and flimsy by design in order to very lightly exfoliate an outer layer of skins from a medical practitioner's arms and hands. They are not designed for, and in fact are generally too soft and flimsy to clean the gap underneath a person's fingernails.
For this reason, state of the art surgical scrub brushes (e.g., BD E-Z scrub) are pre-packaged together with a separate tool for cleaning underneath the person's fingernails. The tool is molded from rigid plastic and is used much like a metal manicure blade or pocket knife to mechanically scrape dirt and debris from the gap under the fingernails. In practice, many surgeons and other medical practitioners do not use the fingernail cleaning tool because the process is time consuming and difficult, resulting on hands that are not fully sanitized or adequately sterilized prior to surgery or other medical procedures where sterilization is desired or critical.